What Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’s ending means for the future of the MCU

polygon.com:

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is aptly titled: Between the Quantum Realm, the Ant-Man family, and the time-traveling warlord Kang the Conqueror, there’s a lot going on. And that’s on top of the movie literally ending on an open question — it’s designed to be confusing, because it’s opening up so many future MCU stories. This is all before the two post-credit scenes.

What does it all mean for the future of Marvel universe, which is barrelling toward Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars? Let’s see if we can untangle these quantum threads without starting any… Kangtroversy.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and Loki.]

Quantumania was billed as our first real intro to Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror, the time-traveling warlord who will function as the final boss for the next three years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So it’s reasonable to be a little confused when he gets his butt mega-handed to him at the end.

Kang gets caught in a shrinky portal that appears to destroy him utterly. All of team Ant-Man makes it out of the Quantum Realm and safely back to normal size. The people of the Quantum Realm are freed from tyranny. And Scott Lang goes back to his happy-go-lucky life.

Or does he?

Polygon spoke to Quantumania director Peyton Reed about giving Kang such a big feature role only to kill him at the end of the story, and Reed confirmed: Kang is dead — long live Kang.

Reed said the idea was for this movie’s Kang to be “the most feared, most formidable Kang of all of them” — but that part of that setup was creating the future menace of all the alternate Kangs seen in the film’s mid-credits scene.

“At the